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If City College can't come up with $250,000 the cafeteria, a prime training ground for wannabe chefs will have to close. Lance Iversen/The San Francisco Chronicle

On Friday The Chronicle ran an editorial urging restaurants and alumni of City College of San Francisco to come to the rescue of the CCSF culinary arts and hospitality program. Administrators are being forced to cut $250,000 out of the $1.6 million budget, and that will entail forcing the school to close the cafeteria where the students get hands-on experience serving 900 meals a day.

It was a follow up to a story written by Stacy Finz detailing the problem. I hope the call for donations will be heeded. The city needs these trained students — about 250 a year go through the program — and CCSF is one of the prime venue to help a budding chefs get his or her foot in the door. Plus, it’s affordable — a 2-year degree costs about $3,000. Compare that to Le Cordon Bleu’s California Culinary Academy, where students pay more than 10 times that amount.

We’ve had students from both programs externing in our test kitchen; in fact, we have three CCA graduates now on our Food & Wine staff. However, as the years have progressed and the tuition has risen, we’ve noticed that the externs aren’t generally as well trained as they were in the past. If you talk to restaurant owners who have students from both programs, I think you’ll find the $3,000 education is every bit as good as the private cooking school.

No matter how good the training, few, if any, students are equipped to take over a kitchen or the dining room once they have that diploma in hand. Still, school does teach the basics and gives the students a heads-up, which is why the City College program is so valuable.

The cafeteria is one of the major ways the students get that practical experience; to close it won’t help the students or the restaurants that will hire them.

To keep the doors open, the school is hosting a town hall meeting this morning where Dean David Dore will address students concerns about losing the cafeteria that serves up to 900 meals a day.

Dore says that to help close the gap, City College administrators have voluntarily taken pay cuts, and he is planning a campaign to reach out to alumni to make donations to save the cafeteria.

Already John Konstin, owner of John’s Grill and co-chair of the program’s advisory board, has put up $60,000.

If you’re interested in donatingclick here or call Tannis Reinhertz at (415) 239-3154.